Office 12 audio presentation by Jensen Harris
BayCHI has put yet another audio recording online. The latest event is a two hour presentation with Jensen Harris of the Microsoft Office team. He shares his thougts on usability and the challenges of shaping the new user interface.
Farewell, menus and toolbars. More than 20 years after the introduction of the Macintosh, software has outgrown the basic building blocks of today’s standard user interface. The upcoming version of Microsoft Office does away with the top-level menus and toolbars in favor of a new task-oriented, contextual user interface.
This talk will provide a historical perspective on the evolution of the Office user interface and the battle against the mounting complexity of the product. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the different design iterations, and an in-depth look at the new Office UI constructs, including the Ribbon, galleries, contextual tabs, and the MiniBar. You’ll also learn the ideas behind “results-oriented design,” which Jakob Nielsen wrote, “might well be the way to empower users in the future.”
With 400 million Office users potentially making this transition, would embracing these concepts solve problems in your own products?
BayCHI has an impressive Podcast section with tons of events available for everybody to hear: Audio recordings and presentations.
After Jensen Harris, I want to hear Evan Williams talk. Evan is CEO at Odeo (podcast service made easy), and former CEO of Pyra Labs that built Blogger.com. He quotes Jason Kottke for this brilliant point:
…most significant advances in software are actually advances in user experience, not in technology. Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL’s original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client… The advantages that these applications offered people were user experience-oriented, not technology-oriented.
So very true!
UPDATE 2005-12-21: Now I heard the presentation. Very recommendable. Also, the presenter told that there will be a video posted on the BayCHI event website soon.
Technorati Tags: usability, podcast, mp3, presentation, Jensen Harris, BayCHI, Evan Williams, Odeo, Jason Kottke, user experience
